Third person limited POV for different characters

It's perfectly okay. Just make sure you switch only at scene or chapter breaks and you'll be fine.

You can certainly have more than one POV and switch from one POV to another. When you do this, you want to carry the reader with you, almost unnoticing.

As Katie points out, this is much easier to do at a scene break or a chapter break. You just name the new POV character, right first thing, have him do something that makes it clear you're 'in his head' and off you go.

It works like . . .


William, Temper, and Milton marched ahead of him over the crest of the hill. They called back, "Come on, Horace. Hurry up. Look!"

Profoundly suspicious, he followed.

#

Dawn came late that morning. Gregoria sat up to look out the window, stretching and smelling blood in the air.



You can also switch POV in the middle of a scene. This is a difficult technique that takes a good bit of reading to see how other folks do it. I do not employ this switching-POV-in-the-middle-of-a-scene myself because it is very hard to do well.

It's fine so long as it doesn't happen in the same scene.

I don't like omniscient, so this is fine. I change between characters with each chapter. See George R.R. Martin's books for a perfect example of this.

job said:

You just name the new POV character, right first thing, have him do something that makes it clear you're 'in his head' and off you go.

Click to expand...

Precisely.
Read thriller/suspense novels written in 3rd person limited multiple viewpoint. POVs tend to jump around quite a bit in those to keep the intensity high, especially toward the climax, and if not executed correctly, you can lose the reader quicker than a wink. Analyze how the author makes it work. You'll notice a pattern at the start of new scenes or chapters, namely, what was mentioned in the above comment.

I'm not an expert in anything but, as a reader, I suggest making sure you don't use each switch solely to show character. If you use each one to say "this is what this character is like" or "this is what this character is like" then it gets boring fast. Something interesting should be happening with each character.

I had this book I really wanted to read (it was the continuation of a franchise I won't name here), but so much of the beginning was just an uninteresting incident being observed by different characters. Everyone was just wondering what other characters were wondering about.

Ugh.

Kosh said:

I'm not an expert in anything but, as a reader, I suggest making sure you don't use each switch solely to show character. If you use each one to say "this is what this character is like" or "this is what this character is like" then it gets boring fast. Something interesting should be happening with each character.

I had this book I really wanted to read (it was the continuation of a franchise I won't name here), but so much of the beginning was just an uninteresting incident being observed by different characters. Everyone was just wondering what other characters were wondering about.

Ugh.

Click to expand...

Too true. Martin switches between many POV characters, but he has a full story arc for each of them.

It's not only acceptable, it's close to the norm.

Here's the key: It's best to choose the character who has the biggest emotional investment in the scene (usually the one with the scene-goal that's being thwarted).

If you're switching protagonist, while the character who was the protagonist in the last scene is present in this one, there had better be a reason that the reader agrees with for changing, because if they've been helping that other character make his/her decisions, and have an emotional investment in wanting to know what they will do next, the change may be annoying. Let's assume that in the previous scene the protagonist has had his scene goal interfered with. Tension mounts as he tries and fails to get things back on track, until disaster causes him to abandon the effort and begin a passive sequel to the scene, while he licks his wounds and thinks about what to do next.

Given that, the reader, who has been privy to that decision-making has an interest in seeing how the new strategy will work. But when the scene opens, we find have a new protagonist, with different goals, and we're not on board with why they want what they want, so there will have to be some prose devoted to bringing the reader up to speed—hopefully not an info-dump lecture by the author.

Because of that, I would guess such switching might work best where story-lines are converging, and it's another group of characters who are involved (or be damn carefully managed).

Even that may have problems, though. If we were in the head of the "he" and now we're in the head of his "she," and we learn that he wants her, and she wants him, why hang around till those two dopes figure that out?

There has to be a proper reason for showing those other POVs. Because when you switch POV, you're moving the story backwards:

Let's say I have Chapter 1 and 2 where we're in Billy's third limited. I've had to establish/suggest Billy's character, establish the point of the character, introduce his person 'world'- that is, the places he goes and who is important in his life. Then we've got his story moving...

And suddenly we're switched to Mary's POV. Who's Mary? Even if Mary was mentioned in the prior chapters, we don't really know her importance and we still don't entirely know why Billy is important. As well as moving the story on, we've got to set up her world and character...Just when we're getting interested and the story's moving...

We switch to another one. See what I mean? You can end up with loads of undeveloped scenes because of an impulse/necessity to keep switching. If you're just using 4 POVs as you want the reader to sympathise with all 4, just make these characters worthy of sympathy in the first place. The reader can feel sympathetic towards a character without following them and following them does not automatically give a better insight into either the character or the story.

Personally I'd re-evaluate whether this story needs multiple third-limited (don't worry, you can use that for other stories) and then if it does, make sure each character has a clear arc and that the scenes aren't too jumpy.

I'm currently writing a book the same way, Reingold. It's going good, and I think it can work, but as others have said, it is sometimes hard to make sure that the story doesn't get too jumpy.

One series of books that I've read that does it amazingly (if you like fantasy novels) is Robin Hobb's Ship of Magic series. She switches between tons of different characters. And actually, with that book, she did it so well that I think I wouldn't have liked it half as much if she'd stuck with one POV.